I've felt for a while now that capitalism is inherently harmful to healthcare. Right from the get-go, I think it's morally wrong to profit from sickness and death. That seems pretty clear to me. I don't think everything should simply be free; doctors and medicine cost money. But profitability, especially for publicly-traded companies, shouldn't be the thing that prevents people from affording medicine.

Pharmaceutical companies are harmed (in a sense) by capitalism in two key ways: (1) In seeking a profit, a company will only develop drugs that have the largest market and/or the lowest development costs, and (2) due to the arguably deleterious patent and trademark system, a company can and will charge as much as they want regardless of the actual cost to develop and produce a drug. The standard rationale is that the company needs to recoup research and development costs. But a simple web search shows a number of pharmaceutical companies perform quite well for their investors, which we like to separate from the idea of profiting from sickness and death.

Health insurance companies are a necessary evil because they allow large groups of people to afford unexpected, large expenses. But when an insurance company is publicly traded, which many are, their mission changes from providing a necessary service for humans to providing a profit for investors. This, again, is an idea we like to think of as free market capitalism producing profits, instead of corporations profiting from people dying.

I think capitalism is largely a good economic system, capable of incentivizing great ideas and allowing class mobility. But unregulated free market capitalism, especially with regards to the healthcare industry, directly profits from disease and death. This is a bad thing. #money#health